Fast food is taking flight as drones battle Iceland’s rain and snow

THE ECONOMIST
OCTOBER 25, 2018

When drones came to public attention about a decade ago, various commercial uses were proposed for them. Some of these, such as surveying, aerial photo­graphy and law enforcement, have now become routine. But one, in particular, has not. This is the idea of household deliveries. In 2013 online retailer Amazon said it was testing just such a system. Others suggested using drones to deliver medicines and fast food. However, not much then happened.

This slowness was caused by caution on the part of regulators. In most countries people are not allowed to fly drones above other people, near buildings or out of sight of the operator. Commercial activities are strictly regulated and some flights need clearance from aviation authorities. Slowly, as ­operators have gained experience and demonstrate a good safety ­record, some regulators have begun to relax the rules.

Iceland is a typical example. In August last year Kristofersson teamed up with the Israeli drone-service company Flytrex. The pair persuaded Iceland’s transport authorities to let them start a drone delivery service across ­Vioeyjarsund, an inlet that divides Reykjavik from its eastern suburbs. Delivery drivers would load goods weighing up to 3kg into a drone on one side of the inlet and it would fly autonomously along a fixed route to land on the other side, where the goods would be collected by another team of drivers who would take them to their final destinations.

“We learnt a lot,” says Kristofersson. One thing was the impact of weather. Iceland is often wet and windy, but the drone used for this operation could not fly in rain — and for safety reasons Aha avoided gusty conditions. This meant the drone was grounded for about half of the time it might otherwise have been flying. Nevertheless, when it could fly it saved time and money because the flight took four minutes instead of the 20 or more required to drive around Vioeyjarsund.

The experience they gained in running the trans-Vioeyjarsund service allowed Aha and Flytrex to obtain permission to run 12 other routes across Reykjavik, including journeys over land. And operations have just been extended again, permitting drones to deviate by up to 700m either side of those fixed routes. This means ­deliveries can now be made to the backyards of registered customers who have obtained their neighbours’ permission for flights to pass overhead.

Those customers can order goods using online apps and, weather permitting, select a drone delivery. Most of the shops and restaurants taking part are close to Aha’s office, where they drop off goods to be delivered. These are then loaded into a drone by a ­company employee, who dispatches the craft after entering the destination using a handheld device. The customer gets a message to say the drone is on its way, and can follow its progress. When it arrives, the customer enters a PIN into the app to accept delivery and the drone ­lowers its package on a line. Should someone try to pull the line, it detaches from the drone.

With a third drone on order — this one a waterproof version that can fly in the rain — Kristofersson hopes to deliver to more places more often, with the potential of up to 100 flights a day. The drones, made by DJI, a Chinese firm, do not use cameras or radar to navigate. They rely solely on the Global Positioning System to know where they are — though, for ­safety’s sake, they have three ­independent GPS-based systems on board. But even though the drones fly out of sight of Aha’s ­office, they are monitored constantly during their journey and can be recalled if something ­appears to be going wrong, or ordered to make an emergency landing by slowly fluttering down while making a loud warning noise.

Flytrex boss Yariv Bash says delivery-by-drone services which, like the Icelandic example, start with fixed routes that gradually become more ambitious, are beginning to appear in other places. His company is about to help launch one that will use drones to deliver packages in North Carolina. Uber, a ride-­hailing service, is also planning to launch drone ­deliveries for food.

Next month in Singapore, a drone made by Airbus, a European aerospace group, will begin ferrying supplies and spare parts to ships moored offshore. Airbus is working on the project with ­Wilhelmsen, a marine-services company. Wilhelmsen reckons that using drones will reduce ­delivery costs to vessels by up to 90 per cent and will be safer than employing launches to carry those deliveries by sea. Alibaba, China’s biggest e-commerce firm, is making drone deliveries on several fixed routes across the vast Shanghai Jinshan Industrial Park and has plans to launch similar operations in other areas.

A common factor among these new drone services is that they are not operating in densely built-up areas. Despite the early predictions that drones would be used to deliver fast food and other goods to city dwellers, the reality is turning out to be rather different. For a start, there are flight restrictions on all aircraft in high-rise places like Manhattan and central London. There is also the difficulty of finding places for drones to land or hover outside apartment windows. Nor do the economics stack up. In cities, typical distances for delivering fast food might be under a kilometre, which makes it efficient to use mopeds or bicycles. Reykjavik, however, is a low-rise, spread-out sort of place. The average distance over which a meal is delivered is about 7km.

If regulators continue to relax requirements for line-of-sight ­operations, long-distance delivery by drone will become particularly appealing. In some cases, though, a different sort of drone may be needed. One such has just completed six months of test flights in Tanzania. This drone is built by Wingcopter, a German firm, and is of a type known as a “tilt-rotor”. That means it uses its rotors for vertical takeoff and landing, but for horizontal flight it tilts them forward to operate like the pro­pellers of an aeroplane. This arrangement, which is beginning to be used for manned helicopters as well, results in a big increase in speed and range. In neighbouring Rwanda a firm called Zipline does not even bother with vertical takeoff. Its drones are small, fixed-wing aircraft launched by catapult.

In the Tanzanian trials the ­delivery company DHL used a Wingcopter to fly medical supplies from Mwanza, on the shores of Lake Victoria, about 60km to a clinic on Ukerewe Island. Blood and other samples from the clinic’s patients were then flown back to Mwanza for laboratory analysis. The drone journey took 40 minutes, compared with six hours by road and ferry. Zipline, though, is beyond the stage of trials. Its drones are now in regular use ­delivering blood for transfusion to rural clinics.

Flying life-saving medical supplies around is, to be sure, more important than getting pizzas to customers while they are still hot. But with technology improving, and provided that operators can continue to run safe operations, more companies are likely to follow in Aha’s footsteps and move into the business of delivering by drone. And safety, too, is improving all the time.

Drones can ­already be “ring-fenced” electronically to stop them straying into dangerous areas such as airports. Small collision-avoidance systems are also under development, to prevent them crashing into things. Eventually, no doubt, drones that can safely navigate the canyons of tall cities will emerge. But for the immediate future, the hungry folk in the burbs and out in the sticks will have first call on the drone-delivery option on their fast-food apps